Frameworks for Europe’s Past

This book is about the prehistoric archaeology of Europe—the lives and deaths of peoples and cultures—about how we became human; the rise of hunters; the birth and growth of society; the emergence of art; the beginnings of agriculture, villages, towns and cities, wars and conquest, peace and trade—the plans and ideas, achievements and failures, of our ancestors across hundreds of thousands of years. It is a story of humanity on planet Earth. It’s also about the study of the past—how archaeologists have dug into the ground, uncovered the remaining traces of these ancient peoples, and begun to make sense of that past through painstaking detective work. This book is about prehistoric societies from the Stone Age into the Iron Age. The story of European prehistory is one of spectacular growth and change. It begins more than a million years ago with the first inhabitants. The endpoint of this journey through the continent’s past is marked by the emergence of the literate societies of classical Greece and Rome. Because of a long history of archaeological research and the richness of the prehistoric remains, we know more about the past of Europe than almost anywhere else. The prehistory of Europe is, in fact, one model of the evolution of society, from small groups of early human ancestors to bands of huntergatherers, through the arrival of the first farmers to the emergence of hierarchical societies and powerful states in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The chapters of our story are the major ages of prehistoric time (Stone, Bronze, and Iron). The content involves the places, events, and changes of those ages from ancient to more recent times. The focus of the chapters is on exceptional archaeological sites that provide the background for much of this story. Before we can begin, however, it is essential to review the larger context in which these developments took place. This chapter is concerned with the time and space setting of the archaeology of Europe.

Centers of Power, Weapons of Iron

The introduction of iron after 1000 BC brought new tools and weapons to Europe. Smelting technology and higher furnace temperatures were likely the key to iron production, which is generally thought to have originated in Anatolia around 1400 BC among the Hittites, but there are a few earlier examples of iron artifacts as old as 2300 BC in Turkey. Iron produced sharper, more readily available implements and was in great demand. In contrast to copper and tin, whose sources were limited, iron was found in a variety of forms in many places across the continent. Veins of iron ore were exploited in Iberia, Britain, the Alps, the Carpathian Mountains, and elsewhere. Bog iron was exploited in northern Europe. Carbonate sources of iron in other areas enabled local groups to obtain the raw materials necessary for producing this important material. At the same time, the collapse of the dominant Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean changed the flow of raw materials and finished products across Europe. Greece fell into a Dark Age following the demise of the Mycenaean city-states. The Etruscans were on the rise in Italy. Rome was a small town at the border of the Etruscan region. Soon, however, new centers of power in classic Greece and Rome emerged, bringing writing and, with it, history to Europe. Again, we can observe important and dramatic differences between the “classic” areas of the Mediterranean and the northern parts of “barbarian” Europe. The chronology for the Iron Age in much of Europe is portrayed in Figure 6.2. The Iron Age begins earlier in the Mediterranean area, ca. 900 BC, where the Classical civilizations of Greece, the Etruscans, and eventually Rome emerge in the first millennium BC. Rome and its empire expanded rapidly, conquering much of western Europe in a few decades before the beginning of the Common Era and Britain around ad 43, effectively ending the prehistoric Iron Age in these parts of the continent. The Iron Age begins somewhat later in Scandinavia, around 500 BC.

The First Farmers

The origins and spread of agriculture and a Neolithic way of life marked a major turning point in the evolution of human society. Farming changed everything. Our heritage as food collectors, consuming the wild products of the earth, extends back millions of years. Nevertheless, at the end of the Pleistocene some human groups began to produce their own food rather than collect it, to domesticate and control wild plants and animals, achieving what is perhaps the most remarkable transformation in our entire human past. Agriculture is a way of obtaining food that involves domesticated plants and animals. But the transition to farming is much more than simple herding or cultivation. It also entails major, long-term changes in the structure and organization of the societies that adopt this new way of life, as well as a totally new relationship with the environment. Hunters and gatherers largely live off the land in an extensive fashion, generally exploiting diverse resources over a broad area; farmers intensively use a smaller portion of the landscape and create a milieu that suits their needs. With the transition to agriculture, humans began to truly change their environment. Cultivation of plants and herding of animals, village society, and pottery did not originate in Europe. Domestication arrived from the ancient Near East. The Neolithic began in southwest Asia some 11,000 years ago and eventually spread into the European continent, carried by expanding populations of farmers. The mountains of western Iran and southern Turkey and the uplands of the Levant (the coastal region of the far eastern part of the Mediterranean, from the northeastern Sinai Peninsula through modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, and west along the modern Turkish coast) form an elevated zone somewhat cooler and wetter than much of the Near East. The area has been described as the Fertile Crescent. A variety of wild plants grow in abundance. This region was the natural habitat of many of the wild ancestors of the first species of plants and animals to be domesticated at the end of the Pleistocene: the wild wheats and barleys, the wild legumes, and the wild sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle that began to be exploited in large numbers at the origins of agriculture.

The Creative Explosion

Two related phenomena characterize the last 30,000 years or so of the Pleistocene and the Old Stone Age in Europe, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic. The first of these is the arrival of a version of ourselves, Homo sapiens, around 40,000 years ago. The second is the creative explosion in technology, equipment, raw materials, art, and decoration that took place in this period. There appears to have been a substantial upgrade in human abilities and the variety of activities taking place. The first part of this chapter examines some of the sites and places that tell this story. At the end of the Pleistocene and the Paleolithic, 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers continued to thrive in a warmer, “postglacial” Europe, but their time was coming to an end. Agriculture had been invented in the Near East and was spreading toward the continent, arriving in the southeast by 7000 BC and reaching the northeast by 4000 BC. This period of post-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Europe is known as the Mesolithic and is the focus of the second part of this chapter. By the end of the Pleistocene, Homo sapiens had created art, invented many new tools, made tailored clothing, started counting, and spread to almost all parts of the world. As noted earlier, the oldest known representatives of anatomically modern humans have been found in East Africa, from almost 200,000 years ago. Further evidence of the activities of these individuals comes from caves around Pinnacle Point on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and dates to 165,000 years ago. This evidence is not in the form of fossil skeletons, but artifacts. Several finds—small stone blades, pieces of red ochre (an iron mineral used as a pigment), the earliest known collection and consumption of shellfish—point to new kinds of food, new tools that probably required hafting, and the use of powdered mineral as a pigment or preservative. These are firsts in the archaeological record and likely document the beginnings ative explosion witnessed more fully after 50,000 years ago.

The First Europeans

The story of our human ancestors is a fascinating, but fragmentary, tale. There are lots of missing pages in the book. The further back we go in time, the less evidence is available and the more conjecture is required to fill in the gaps. Our oldest arguably human ancestors are found mostly in East and South Africa, resemble our ape family relatives, and date to more than 6 mya (million years ago). These individuals walked on two feet, the first step on the path to becoming human. Fossils of our ancient ancestors are diagnosed as to genus and species, a dual scientific designation in Latin; a wide range of names have been applied. We modern humans are Homo sapiens. Some of our earliest relatives have species names such as Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis, and many others. These names are often more confusing than enlightening for anyone but the experts. To make a long story short, there appear to have been several early humanlike ancestors and the exact relationships among them are not clear. These individuals walked on two legs, had relatively small brains, did not use tools, and were largely vegetarian. Sometime around 2.5 mya, however, a clearer line of human evolution emerged with the appearance of the first members of our own genus, Homo, again in East Africa. This area is the center for most of the current research on early human ancestors. There are fossil-containing geological deposits from the appropriate time periods. Many of the earliest human remains have been found in this region. The first Homo is subtitled habilis, or tool-using human. At about this same time, the first evidence for the manufacture of simple stone tools comes to light. These so-called pebble tools provided a cutting edge for a creature that lacked sharp teeth and claws. Stone tools may have afforded better access to meat for these individuals, whose brains began to grow from ape toward human in size. Shortly after 2 mya a new species, Homo ergaster, emerged in Africa and our evolutionary story started to change dramatically.

Bronze Age Warriors

The European Bronze Age took place during the third and second millennia BC. This same period witnessed the first civilizations and empires in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley—the first cities, the first states, the first writing systems, and many other innovations. Europe unquestionably felt the impact of these changes. Partially in response to these developments, and 1,000 years before the classical civilizations of Greece, 2,000 years before Rome, the Aegean area witnessed the emergence of more complex societies on Crete and the Greek mainland. The Minoan palaces and Mykenean (also known as Mycenaean) citadels were urban centers of these civilizations and the focal points of industry, commerce, religion, military power, and central accumulation. North of the Alps, there was much less political integration; societies operated on a smaller scale. This pattern continued essentially until the Roman conquest of France and much of Britain, shortly before the Common Era. More details on the developments in southern and northern Europe are provided in subsequent sections of this chapter. Bronze defines this period and becomes the dominant metal in Europe. As noted earlier, it has several advantages over copper. Because it holds an edge much better, most of the early bronze objects were weapons: swords, daggers, spearheads, and arrowheads, in the context of continuing warfare. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin or arsenic. Initially it was made from copper and arsenic to form arsenic bronze. Some copper ores naturally contain a good bit of arsenic, and smelting these ores may have accidentally created an early form of bronze. Copper ores are available and fairly widespread in Europe from Ireland to Bulgaria. Sources are concentrated in mountainous regions and more often found in the Alps and to the south and east. Some of these copper sources were incredibly productive. The Mitterberg mines near Salzburg in Austria, with tunnels up to 100 m (330 m) in length, may have produced as much as 18,000 tons of copper. Bronze production in Europe began in the Aegean region with the rise of early civilizations on Crete and mainland Greece.